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Chuck's Treats: 2006-2007 Fanmail Sandbox

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So, I always hear about this, "send Chuck a letter and get stuff" deal, but I have no idea where to send my letter. He is my favorite contemporary author and would love to just be able to ask him a few questions about his works. What address do these letters go to?

I am sure it will be announced here when one opens up. The last one was in October 2006 so it may be a while before he opens the window again - Chuck spent months responding to every letter received during that one month.

With as much credit as I want to give Chuck, I am going to guess that he just started with the necklaces as the first letters came in, optimistic that he would be able to do necklaces for everyone, and then as thousands upon thousands came in, he either ran out of rocks or moved on... it seems everyone got one "large" gift, be it a necklace, a foldout comb, a harmonica, a swiss army knife, etc and I am going to bet that it just had to do with the chronology of the letters...

I didn't get a necklace, but I got other "large" gifts: I got the Swiss-style army knife, the switchblade comb, and the harmonica, so I can't complain at all, y'know?! My letter was mailed about 18 October, I think.

I don't know about sharing the CD's....He says in the letter that he made them purely for people who wrote to him, and they're never going to be for sale. I suppose if everyone promised not to reproduce them and sell them, but I don't know. I would feel weird doing it. Maybe someone else can do it. I don't feel comfortable. There is no Mr. Elegant story on there, but there is a new one called "Cold Calling." It's really great, it's about telemarketers.

.'.93.'.

I saw Chuck at Vroman's in Pasadena this past Monday, and he read "Cold Calling". It's a great story, and was more than just clever. It really shows the ridiculous aspect of being anyone other than yourself. It kind of reminded me a bit of "Survivor".

Congratulations on getting a package from Chuck.:headbang: Sounds like he goes to great lengths to make each package special. I was able to get a plastic hamburger and some fake flowers that he tossed at me during the reading. They're my new talismans of inspiration.

Hey all,
Is there anyone out there who is still waiting for a letter?
Just curious as I have been running to the mail box everyday for like a month now since I heard he still had 2000 letters to respond to.

I feel the pain. am thinking of giving up hope, too. I followed the directions really well. put the right postage on it...didn't get it returned to sender. maybe someone got to it before I did (apartment building). it kind of sucks. but you have company, MD and Pits-brother too. maybe we could write a joint letter next time. : (

He said he received thousands of letters and didn't respond to them all before tour. After he's been choked, and does a signing on the sixteenth, I assume he'll return to fan mail. It's common lore that he's compulsive about trying to respond to each and every letter. My memory is spongy, but I'm pretty sure for the last fan mail window people received packages late into the summer. THis time around he received more letters, so I'd expect people to get responses into winter. Of course this is conjecture, so please keep this place posted when and if you receive recipes.

A letter telling me how great it is to make people cry... and goodies:
- A calculator in the shape of an English post box
- A rubber spider
- A stuffed koala bear
- A rubber severed finger
- Mints
- Two CDs with Chuck's stories read out loud
- A pocket knife
- Several packets of seeds to grow flowers
- A deck of cards
- Clay in some plastic egg-shaped thingy
- A plastic carrot
- And lots of confetti (I made the box open on my bed, not so good idea)
- And probably stuff I'm forgetting now...

I'm Heather's husband and posting this for her....& myself. I don't think Chuck could possibly imagine how happy he made my wife last night. She got a package he promised me he'd send to her when I met him briefly at the airport. Not only did he send her the standard funny stuff.....This wonderful, beautiful man sent my wife a handmade (by him) stone necklace, it also had the little stones with letters strung together to say to heather hinkle from chucky p. She cried for like half an hour she was so happy. He also sent her a personal letter telling her what each stone was and telling her how good of a husband I was. The best gift I've ever been able to give her. What an incredible person!!!

I can't think of a time that I've ever been so excited about getting a gift. This has made my year! I'm so thankful for everything he sent to me. I'm going to get all of it (except the necklace) frames in a shadow box to hang in my living room. Thank your so very much Chuck. You'll never know what this has ment to me.

I'd like to first state that I apologize to all of you out there, both past recipients of these 'care packages' and those who have yet to get them. Also a big apologetic-tinged thanks to Mr. Palahniuk himself of course.

The reason I apologize is because when I first got to see Chuck, last November at the Las Vegas Book Festival event at UNLV's Student Union, I didn't intend to write him a letter. Somewhere in midst of sitting there listening to his remarks, his answers to our questions, his talk of the liminoid experiences and liminal time, I just couldn't seem to help it. I felt I had a few things I wanted to say, to share with the man, and I didn't want to try to bumble and stutter through it while standing there in front of him later with people behind me waiting in line.

I scribbled it down on a couple pieces of notebook paper I had in my hand. I cannot quote the entirety of the note verbatim, but it essentially went like this:

[I]"Mr. Palahniuk.

I am trying to find something of my own liminal experience, my own personal crises towards resolution. This past year I was diagnosed with the beginning of an intestinal cancer and Crohn's disease. I am right now in the middle of sixteen weeks of chemotherapy. I have not spoken to my father since this past June because he and his new wife accused me of faking the cancer for some kind of attention even when I just wanted them to leave me alone. My wife bought a ticket to be here with me tonight but instead was called away to a private engagement. She works as a dancer and nude model and as such is currently our only means of finance or she would've been here with me even now.

Your work has been one of the single most inspiring and perplexing of influences on my thinking. I hope you continue to find your way through these fascinating but somehow not-ever-fully-resolved questions we seem each comprised of. At least for me, you have helped answer a few of my own. I wrote all this down last-minute because I didn't want to waste your time or other people's babbling through it. Apologies for intruding with this letter when I know so many others have to wait patiently to send you theirs."[/I]

I *did* include my name and contact info, but not because I wanted a reply or ever expected one. It's a force of long habit I was raised with that anything you write should have your information, so as to be polite to whomever you're asking to take the time to read it. If nothing else, he was free to post it on his website and rightfully ask that all of you call often, call late, and tell me what a selfish whining horse's ass I was for doing this.

Then in May, when Chuck stopped back in our hometown of Columbus, Ohio, my wife and I felt this sort of powerful rush feeling. We had to go back. My wife had not seen him before, and I couldn't entirely explain to her just what the feeling was like to meet and hear the man. We crammed a couple bags' worth of clothes together, called friends to see who'd let us crash for a night at their place, and managed a quick-and-dirty red-eye flight deal to Ohio.

It was a great event, and before we left home, I committed my second sin: I typed up a second letter. This time though it was to tell him that I was through the chemo, and as of December 12th I was considered safely in remission. I felt, I don't know why, like it was my responsibility that if I'd burdened him once by telling him anything so dismal about myself or my outlook the last time we passed each other, that I at least owed him the option to feel he could subsequently consider me a 'case closed' when I told him I was doing better. I still don't speak to my father or his wife, and I won't say everything's great and sunshine out of our ass, but my wife and I are feeling a lot better where we are now than looking back at the other end of this road thirteen or so months ago.

So yeah, last week a box comes in the mail, I see who the sender is and the Portland, OR postage and the Donadio & Olson agency info...and I panicked a little. Breathed fast, felt shaky. I cut open the package and there it was:

But perhaps more than anything, the letter of his response. And I realized that the package had been sent to our new address (we moved in February), not forwarded.

Meaning he'd read both letters, and not thought I was an asshole apparently for them. And he took the time and consideration that we're all now well-familiarized with but I think I'll never stop being amazed by it.

Obviously I won't go into the details of the letter--those of you who've gotten your own replies no doubt had remarks or thoughts shared between you and Chuck in your correspondence that are as personal to you as this was for me.

But I got a reply back, and I can't think of anything that has made me happier since the day my wife first said she loved me back, or last December when my only real Christmas gift was being told I could expect to live, however shaky that prospect in itself seemed to me at the time.

Gifts and kind regards do not fix everything. Great money and success and fame are not in themselves the end-all solution to misery. You will have rough patches in your life and those are not going to go away at some point, never to return.

But sometimes you can check your mail, and get a payment in kind from someone showing the time and thoughtfulness such as this to have thought of you.

Thanks, Mr. Palahniuk. I can't tell you what it meant to me and my wife, her hugging me as I read the letter between us, with her knowing exactly now what it felt and meant to me to have gotten it. Thanks a million.

There are limits to what he accepts. Usually it's double spaced printed letters, nothing more. It has to fit in a regular envelope. And he answers thousands and thousands of these things personally so, (and I'm not knocking your story here) he probably wouldn't appreciate someone sneaking a manuscript in.

There are limits to what he accepts. Usually it's double spaced printed letters, nothing more. It has to fit in a regular envelope. And he answers thousands and thousands of these things personally so, (and I'm not knocking your story here) he probably wouldn't appreciate someone sneaking a manuscript in.

Yeah for sure, by short I mean short, one page but yeah I wouldnt want to bother the man.

I'd like to add as part of my apology to my own story on Chuck's reply that I don't ever condone doing what I did, and I sincerely hope nobody out there starts taking Chuck's patience and consideration he showed for me for granted and stretches it thin by trying to duplicate it. Looking back, I would've even told myself, even knowing as a future-me I'd get a package in reply, to not do what I did, on EITHER occasion.

I heartily will always defend the orderly and necessary logistic control that the fan-mail constraints are trying to preserve, most importantly just to give Chuck some personal breathing time of his own.

I can't take back what I did, and I'm a liar if I tried to claim somehow I'm not thrilled it turned out this way. But I could also just as easily have been the last straw for him on one of those event tours, and my message could've just as easily become a piece of hotel-maid flotsam and another new update about what NOT to do if you want to reach the man. And then everybody'd wonder what dickhead pulled the move that cost all of us yet another bit of potential opportunity to communicate with him.

As for passing along a manuscript...I think Chuck would argue that the workshop here and its many various resources and the great extended networks that result from here are more than enough ample feedback for whatever you're wanting to improve upon in your work.

Even being as solid a writer and as dedicated a craftsperson as he is, even Mr. Palahniuk would probably tell you that to put that much weight and value on just his opinion above all the others here that you might be greatly surprised with risks your work not being necessarily better...just a better Chuck Palahniuk-received manuscript, you know?

I've started to think that instead of writing being the sort of craft where you can think of it like woodwork--with a master craftsperson giving apprentices and novices the real tricks and trades that always work on the wood, no matter what, that maybe writing is more like taking on guitar lessons. They can teach you basic tuning, they can even give you some of their techniques for how to tweak the sound, what pedal board arrangements they personally like. But ultimately, even if you really adhere to most of what they advise, you go your way if you really mean to be your own player. Learning how they like the sound and the feel is only going to make you ultimately a good cover band guitarist, not the newest hot sound on the stage.

You don't keep going back to a concert hall packed with everybody from Steve Vai to Les Claypool so they can keep giving you the thumbs-up that it's safe to call yourself a good player...you play in front of the real people like yourself, and you get back the feel of who you are with those folks, not your mentors and (hopefully) your future peers. Even if it means you're gonna be heckled and cat-called and booed off stage once in a while.

If you've got a really short piece, it might just get you a faster and just-as-worthy response to shape it here or in any number of other places offered.

I am elated to see the generosity and kindness that Chuck as displayed in connecting with his fans.
But to be honest: my patience is sinking to the bottom of the sea like a shylock wear concrete slippers.
Are there still people out there who have yet to receive letters?

i got a package from him a couple years back around christmas.
i would've mentioned this earlier, but again, i haven't been on here in quite a long time.

he sent me:
- a signed copy of fugitives & refugees. (go to [url]www.myspace.com/littletinheart[/url] to see a picture. and request me... if you want... :)
- a stocking filled with candy.
- hey! i also got a necklace that said my name!
- fight club soap.
- a "soul" temporary tattoo.
- a stuffed bear, which he referred to as my "power bear".
- trick vomit.

:)
never in a million years would i think fake vomit would be my prized possesion.
but it is.
along with all those other goodies.

so no one wants to share the content of the CD a year later perhaps? I've been a huge fan of him since Choke came out, but I never thought to look online for the guy, I just read his books, so I had no clue about these letters to chuck.

"There is no Mr. Elegant story on there, but there is a [COLOR=Blue]new one called "Cold Calling." It's really great, it's about telemarketers.[/COLOR]"

I bet that's the same one he read to us on his Rant tour. I absolutely loved it! there was something special about his reading stories that weren't published. Like we were being let in on a secret that no one else knows about......The best part, however, was actually hearing him read his own work. For some reason, that was amazing to me.

so no one wants to share the content of the CD a year later perhaps? I've been a huge fan of him since Choke came out, but I never thought to look online for the guy, I just read his books, so I had no clue about these letters to chuck.

I think it's great that the lucky ones among us are keeping the CDs under wraps, even though I do appreciate your predicament!

so no one wants to share the content of the CD a year later perhaps? I've been a huge fan of him since Choke came out, but I never thought to look online for the guy, I just read his books, so I had no clue about these letters to chuck.

I think it's great that the lucky ones among us are keeping the CDs under wraps, even though I do appreciate your predicament!

He gave the CDs with the tour packages as well, so I ended up with two sets. I wouldn't sell them, and I don't feel right giving them away since they were'nt intended for the infidels who didn't write, haha. I did sample the intro to Guts off it for the outro of a youtube vid my friends and I did of meeting Chuck in Boston, which he told us he saw when we saw him again in Montreal.

I'd imagine he'd do it again. When he's got the time. Last year seemed to be filled with book tours and promoting the Choke movie, and now he's got a pretty full plate doing the workshop stuff as well. He seems to get a kick out of doing it, i'd bet that's why he still did it for some of the people showing up at the tours dressed up, so he could still send them out but just have it on a scaled back size.

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